Another failure in Washington

Published 5:44 pm, Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Mere months after the atrocity in Sandy Hook, the U.S. Senate could not muster the 60 votes that senators require to move forward a measure designed to prevent a recurrence.

The vote was for an amendment to a gun-safety bill that would have expanded background checks to include private sales, which make up as much as 40 percent of firearms transactions. Under current law, a purchaser must clear a background check before buying a gun from a legal broker, but not at a gun show or over the Internet. This amendment would have closed that loophole.

Polls show upwards of 90 percent of Americans support it. A huge majority of gun-owners believe it to be necessary. But it is not going to happen.

The procedural hurdles to getting something through the Senate are monumental. As currently understood, they give near-limitless power to a minority of senators to gum up the works however they see fit. (The background checks amendment actually won a majority of votes.) The result is legislative paralysis.

Never was it more starkly displayed.

This bill is not perfect. There is no guarantee it would stop the next deranged individual who wanted to carry out a massacre like the kind that happened in Newtown. But it represents the only chance for the federal government to take any action to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.

Even full-throated supporters of the Second Amendment believe that's a worthy goal.

The low lights of the past week reveal a Washington political establishment even more deeply dysfunctional than we've known.

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell did all he could to avoid a meeting with families of the Newtown victims. After what they've been through, the courtesy of a sit-down was not much to ask.

Then there was fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who suggested President Obama used the Newtown families as "props." As the president's press secretary responded, "They're here because their children were murdered."

Then there was North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, who announced she would not support a vote on expanded background checks because, as she put it, "This conversation should be about what is in people's minds, not about what's in their hands."

Are gun-rights supporters on board with this? They want government to be legislating "what is in people's minds"?

The real question, though, is this: If they oppose widening background checks to include private gun sales, why would they support them for sales from licensed dealers? Why the distinction?

In fact, there is no distinction, other than semantics. There is no coherent reason, if you support the current background check system, to vote against including all firearms transactions (excluding those between family members, as specified in the bill).

It is not Connecticut senators to blame. And certainly the House of Representatives would be an entirely different challenge, with little chance for success.

But the disillusionment from Wednesday's vote is legitimate. Our elected representatives, chosen by America, have failed us. And what's most dispiriting is how expected their failures have become.